bestb(u)y

We’re greedy when grocery shopping.

15 percent of perishable products go to waste in grocery retailing due to damage and spoilage. In a world where almost 1 billion people remain undernourished, this is ethically unjustifiable.

Dynamic pricing is seen everywhere nowadays; from Uber to Lyft to Michigan's football game yesterday, it's shown to be extremely successful. To combat excess food waste within the grocery industry, bestb(u)y provides a platform for grocery stores to implement expiration date-based pricing (EDBP).

Implementing this system heavily benefits both consumers and grocery stores. For consumers, produce and products with closer expiration dates will be cheaper, allowing individuals to get discounts on products. For grocery stores, studies show that gross profit increases in scenarios where EDBP is implemented.

bestb(u)y starts with the supplier (a grocery store, for example). A worker can open up a Windows Form where they can input a barcode number to identify an item. They then set the expiration date / date of shelf placement, and the form creates a QR code for them to print. The printed QR code will then be placed on the item, and when scanned, it opens a webpage that shows what the price is based on EDBP. It will also show when the next discount will occur for that item.

We're a team of four non-cs majors from different schools (UMich, Missouri S&T, WashU, Mizzou) with minimal coding experience (we're operating off intro classes). A large portion of our project was figuring out what tech stack to actually utilize, and, for most of the team, it was our first time branching away from the object-oriented languages we've learned in class. Making a finished product was an accomplishment on its own!

In the future, we'd like to add more functionality because EDBP has been shown to reduce grocery waste down to less than 1%, and a project like this has the potential to help millions of consumers and grocery stores worldwide!

(our domain.com domain is registered but seems to be having errors. pls still consider us tho ty <3)